Related papers: Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Solar System Scien…
The upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in less than three years is certain to bring a revolution in our understanding of many area of astrophysics, with one of the key goals being galaxy evolution. As the first…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for investigating dark matter and dark energy properties. With the advent of large-scale sky surveys, we can discover strong lensing systems on an unprecedented scale, which requires efficient…
We discuss the ground-breaking science that will be possible with a wide area survey, using the MeerKAT telescope, known as MeerKLASS (MeerKAT Large Area Synoptic Survey). The current specifications of MeerKAT make it a great fit for…
The stellar occultation technique provides competitive accuracy in determining the sizes, shapes, astrometry, etc., of the occulting body, comparable to in-situ observations by spacecraft. With the increase in the number of known Solar…
The ESA Euclid mission has been designed to map the geometry of the dark Universe. Scheduled for launch in 2020, it will conduct a six-years visible and NIR imaging and spectroscopic survey over 15,000 deg 2 down to mag~24.5. Although the…
Modern galaxy cluster science is a multi-wavelength endeavor with cornerstones provided by X-ray, optical/IR, mm, and radio measurements. In combination, these observations enable the construction of large, clean, complete cluster catalogs,…
The Telescope to Observe Planetary Systems (TOPS) is a proposed space mission to image in the visible (0.4-0.9 micron) planetary systems of nearby stars simultaneously in 16 spectral bands (resolution R~20). For the ~10 most favorable…
The Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be dedicated to detecting and characterising nearby exoplanets with sizes from sub-Neptune to Earth-size in the neighbourhood of the Sun. This goal is…
Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…
We describe features of the LSST science database that are amenable to scientific data mining, object classification, outlier identification, anomaly detection, image quality assurance, and survey science validation. The data mining…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will revolutionize our understanding of exoplanets with transit spectroscopy of a wide range of mature planets close to their host stars ($<$2 AU) and with coronagraphic imaging and spectroscopy of…
The next decade will feature a growing number of massive ground-based photometric, spectroscopic, and time-domain surveys, including those produced by DECam, DESI, and LSST. The NOAO Data Lab was launched in 2017 to enable efficient…
A major scientific goal of JWST is to probe the epoch of re-ionization of the Universe at z above 6, and up to 20 and beyond. At these redshifts, galaxies are just beginning to form and the observable objects are early black holes,…
Exploration of the time domain - variable and transient objects and phenomena - is rapidly becoming a vibrant research frontier, touching on essentially every field of astronomy and astrophysics, from the Solar system to cosmology. Time…
The 4MOST Cosmology Redshift Survey (CRS) will perform stringent cosmological tests via spectroscopic clustering measurements that will complement the best lensing, cosmic microwave background and other surveys in the southern hemisphere.…
Self-lensing (SL) in binary systems has the potential to provide a unique observational window into the Galactic population of compact objects. Using the $\mathtt{startrack}$ and COSMIC population synthesis codes, we investigate how…
The upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will detect many strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (LSNe Ia) for time-delay cosmography. This will provide an independent and direct way for measuring the Hubble constant $H_0$, which is…
The Chinese Space Station Survey Telescope (CSST) is a flagship space-based observatory. Its main survey camera is designed to conduct high spatial resolution near-ultraviolet to near-infrared imaging and low-resolution spectroscopic…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
The study of planets and small bodies within our Solar System is fundamental for understanding the formation and evolution the Earth and other planets. Compositional and meteorological studies of the giant planets provide a foundation for…